The Tea Party News Network

How Many Personal Trips has Eric Holder Taken on Government Planes?

It seems that the Obama family are not the only ones in the administration abusing taxpayer dollars with vacations excessive in both numbers and cost. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder faced questioning during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing over his use of Justice Department airplanes for personal use. In response to a Government Accountability Report, Holder defended his usage of the planes for personal use by stating that, despite the notion that he’s taken over a hundred trips for personal use, he’s only taken 27.

“My staff keeps telling me to take it easy, you know, well, this is one that gets me,” Holder told Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing. “There was this notion that we’ve taken — I think it was described as hundreds of personal trips. That was wrong. GAO counted flights, not round trips. And we looked at it and figured out from the time period that they were looking, we took not hundreds, but 27 personal, four combined — official and nonpersonal trips — and none of the trips that I took or that the [FBI] director took ever had an impact on the mission capability of those airplanes.”

The committee asked Holder if he intends to report any trips of a personal nature that he takes using government planes in the future. Despite the Obama administration’s promise that it would be the most transparent in history, Holder actually declined saying he would do so only if asked.

“We didn’t have a reporting requirement that existed before,” he said. “If they want to change those rules, we’d be more than glad to make sure that we share that information with the appropriate organization, but this is something that is really wide open.”